An Empirical Study of Handcrafted Feature Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Expression Recognition
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Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Title:An Empirical Study of Handcrafted Feature Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks for Facial Expression Recognition
Abstract:Facial expression recognition is an important computer vision task with applications in human--computer interaction, mental health monitoring, driver alert systems, and behavioral analysis. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) dominate modern facial expression recognition, handcrafted feature descriptors such as Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) remain useful classical baselines. This study compares HOG with Support Vector Machine (SVM), LBP with Logistic Regression, and a lightweight CNN across three facial expression datasets: FER-2013, CK+, and KDEF. The results show that CNNs achieve the best overall performance, particularly on more complex data, while HOG performs strongly in controlled environments. LBP performs poorly across all datasets. The study highlights that dataset complexity significantly affects performance and that robust feature learning is essential for real-world facial expression recognition.
| Comments: | 9 pages, 14 figures, 6 tables |
| Subjects: | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.15288 [cs.CV] |
| (or arXiv:2607.15288v1 [cs.CV] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15288
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Submission history
From: Rallage Rangika Chethiya Bandara Galkaduwa [view email][v1] Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:01:11 UTC (4,521 KB)
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